Ten Things I Hate About the Duke - Loretta Chase Page 0,91

graceful smiles in which her looks are drest!”

On it went, stanza after stanza, in the same vein: the mistress flaunted, the children and home scorned, the wife’s patient nursing met with complaint and ingratitude.

It was true, beyond a doubt, of the plight of all too many women, even those who didn’t marry known libertines.

And there in plain black and white were expressed her deepest fears: of a broken heart, abandonment, neglected children.

Not her fears alone, but those of so many women, because men were granted all manner of license, while women were taught to suffer in silence.

She stared at the newspaper. “I wasn’t taught that,” she murmured. “Or if I was, the lesson didn’t take.”

“Cassandra?”

She looked up from the troubling stanzas at her sister. “This isn’t me.”

She walked to the window and gazed unseeingly out. She saw in her mind’s eye instead: Ashmont with the child. She and Ashmont laughing in the shrubbery. Herself in the demi-mail phaeton—she, driving it, because she could. She was capable and she did it. Ashmont fighting with her—and she, fighting back, unafraid, only determined to win.

She shook her head. “Who did I think I was?”

“I don’t know,” Hyacinth said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“This.” Cassandra shook the piece of newspaper. “This isn’t me. Mr. Owsley must be deranged, and I must be as well. Patience? I? Endure the— What is it?” She looked down. “‘Bleak and bitter day’? I, beguiling ‘the long dark dreary hours’ of Ashmont’s or any other man’s absence?”

Hyacinth smiled. “You, allow a rival under your roof, let alone smile and welcome her? If you did, you’d read Mary Wollstonecraft to her, and bring her round to your way of thinking, and he’d find himself out in the cold.”

“And this: ‘to live unmurmuring on’—in quiet submission to caprice and cruelty, in other words. I, mute and submissive? I should suffocate him with a pillow while he slept, and say it was heart failure. I should never submit to be treated like this. No woman ought to endure it.”

“Have they a choice?” Hyacinth said.

Men had all the power. They owned everything. Women didn’t even own their children. They couldn’t fight back. The law was on the side of men.

Cassandra looked down into the garden, where Papa had taken Ashmont that day. Lord deGriffith could be puzzling at times. He could be wrongheaded and infuriating. Yet she doubted very much that he would have agreed to the plan for a pretend courtship had he truly believed Cassandra was in any danger of being hurt. From his perspective, Ashmont was the one in danger.

In the right circumstances, she could knock him down, her father had said of her. He wasn’t wrong.

She looked down at the newspaper page she held. “What a fool I have been, a fool and a coward. Thank you, Mr. Owsley, for pointing this out to me. You’ve done me a great favor. Now I know what to do.”

“And that is—?”

“I shall write a letter.”

It took Cassandra a while to organize her ideas, but at length she put down what she needed to. Not allowing herself time for second thoughts, she went to Keeffe’s quarters to arrange for discreet delivery to Ashmont House.

There she found a note waiting for her.

Ashmont House

18th Instant

My dear Miss Pomfret,

You need relief from me. I see that finally. Sorry to be so slow, but my brain, you know. Lack of exercise. I need to do something—not sure what yet, but I trust it will come to me in time. Leaving Town under cover of darkness—a touch of drama never hurts. The world will say I’ve slunk away to my usual depravities. If you’ve had enough of me, this will give you the excuse you wanted, to break off our supposed engagement. Your sister’s life is back where it ought to be, and yours will be soon enough, with Keeffe so close to recovering.

In other words, I’ve no excuse to go on plaguing you, or only the thinnest of excuses, and it’s time to face the fact. “No promises,” you said, and I ask none. Must find my own way, without adding to your difficulties. I haven’t given you time to breathe since that morning in Putney. Past time I do it now.

A

Ashmont House

Evening of Friday 19 July

Some years earlier, after one of Their Dis-Graces’ drunken card parties, several drawers in the dressing room had fallen or been pulled out and the contents spilled and trampled on. Sommers had wept for two days, then declared his